I remember when I first started playing guitar.
I was excited about trying something new.
I had a chord chart and I was going to be the rhythm guitar king! After about an hour of fumbling through some basic chords, I was frustrated and the fingers on my left hand were on fire! Here are a couple of tips that I hope will help you as much as they helped me.
First, I will address the throbbing fingers issue.
Unfortunately, there is nothing I have found that will completely eliminate the pain.
However, I can help you a little with this trick.
It is simple and inexpensive.
Before you start practicing, put a drop of super glue on the fingertips of your fret hand.
For most of you this will be your left hand.
For you left-handed players, put it on your right hand.
Make sure to let it dry completely before you touch anything.
This should help your sore fingertips a bit until you build up sufficient callouses.
Now for the chords.
Spend some time practicing each chord one by one.
Start with the basic major chords: A, B, C, D, E, F, and G.
Once you get to where you can strum a clean chord, move on to the next one.
You may want to save F for last.
To make a full F chord, you will have to master the bar chord.
You may be frustrated enough without trying that right away.
99% of songs are going to have more than one chord and you started playing so you could play songs, right? So you are going to have to learn how to change chords.
This is where I strayed a little and came up with my own practice technique.
Music theory generally dictates that only certain chords should be used together.
For instance if you are playing a song in the key of G, you generally will not play a B chord.
You will likely play G, C, and D chords.
How the chords change to each other is called the chord progression.
G to C to D would be a natural chord progression.
I decided that I was going to practice unnatural chord progressions.
Why? I figured that if I could change to chords that I would not usually change to, it would increase the dexterity in my left hand.
If I could master that, changing to chords in a natural progression would be easy.
For me, this technique worked.
Once I was comfortable with each chord I began practicing changing to them in alphabetical order.
I went from A to B to C and so on.
When I got pretty good at that, I switched and went backwards.
G to F to E and so on.
After I was comfortable with those changes, I did the whole cycle from A up to G and back down to A.
The dexterity in my left hand was pretty good after that.
The natural chord progressions were a breeze.
Hopefully, these two tips will help you some.
The one universal tip that I can share is to practice, practice, practice.
There is no substitute for practice.
Like any endeavor in life, you have to dedicate time to it in order to be successful.
Be patient and before long you will be strumming your favorite tunes.